Reasonable Doubt
by Overlithe77
Summary: After Roku's death, Ta Min chases ghosts. Sozin/Ta Min, references to Roku/Ta Min, Roku/Sozin, and Roku/Sozin/Ta Min. 1st place in round 32 of the avatar 500 contest.


**Title: Reasonable Doubt**

**Author:** **overlithe**

**Fandom:** _Avatar: the Last Airbender_

**Summary:** After Roku's death, Ta Min chases ghosts.

**Characters/Pairings:** Ta Min, Sozin; Sozin/Ta Min, references to Roku/Ta Min, Roku/Sozin, and Roku/Sozin/Ta Min

**Prompt:** **avatar_500** prompt 032. Empty; **fanfic100** prompt 047. Not Enough

**Word Count:** 499

**Rating:** T+ for mild sexual content

**Warnings:** There's nothing in the fic above a T+ rating, but this isn't exactly a festival of cheery and comfortable stuff.

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and concepts created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and owned by Nickelodeon and various other corporations/people. I'm not making any money and do not intend any copyright or trademark infringement.

**Author's Note:** I watch way too much _Cold Case_. (And, apparently, so do at least some of the AtLA screenwriters, because, uncovering the truth about a death and Whole Episode Flashback aside, the plot of _The Avatar and the Fire Lord_ is exactly like the plot of a certain _Cold Case_ episode, only with fewer cheerleaders and more volcanoes and utopia. ;)). Also, I have long since given up on trying to make sense of the timeline here and have settled on just being incredibly vague about everyone's ages… ~g~

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><p><strong>Reasonable Doubt<strong>

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><p>She hadn't expected him to come to Roku's funeral. Anger threaded through her flesh as she stepped up to him.<p>

She wanted to—

_scream_

—say:

_You're too late._

_You weren't supposed to fail._

Instead, she spat out 'You have some nerve, showing your face here.' Foolish, she knew, to address the Fire Lord like that. She didn't care.

Face still, Sozin looked at her, at the incense burning skywards under Roku's portrait, and said nothing.

:=:

It took her two weeks, all told, to settle into the house in Ember Island. Corners were furry with dust and spiderfly webs. She dotted cupboards with things she had owned in another life; most of what had been truly hers was now under thirty feet of ash, after all.

At night she lay in bed, sure that under the froth of the ocean she could hear spindly legs scratching at the walls.

Sozin came to see her on the day after she found the pictures, shoved in a trunk under musty cloth. She and Sozin at sixteen, the edges stained with age. She and Roku and Sozin the year after her wedding. When she went outside he was standing in the front porch. Rain dripped off the roof.

'I will leave if you ask me to,' he said. 'I just wanted to see if you are—'

'Shut up,' she said. A pause. 'Come in,' she added, but in a tone sharp enough to hurt.

:=:

Later, she pulled him down to the parlour's floor in a desperate fumble. Like before, he did whatever she told him as she grasped with hungry teeth and burning fingers, as though she could taste Roku in his skin, or at least bury her grief in it.

It didn't work, of course. For all that her husband—_their_ husband, for that matter—had been the Avatar, she knew this was Sozin's world.

Everybody else just lived in it.

:=:

She did it because she had found the pictures.

She kept doing it because once upon a time she had been the Avatar's wife and the Fire Lord's spy, and the three of them had been friends, and lovers, and everything had been bright with possibility.

Because she'd reach in her sleep for someone who was no longer there, then gasp with fresh pain.

Because everything had come apart, bit by bit, and she couldn't stand the whispering of the dust.

:=:

They lay under carved dragons chasing each other across the canopy that had been her parents'. Sweat cooled on her skin.

Sozin spoke up. 'I'll treat your daughter like she were my own. A Fire Nation princess.'

Yes. She knew he would.

'I wasn't supposed to have left him,' she said.

She felt Sozin's face turn away from hers in the half darkness. 'There was nothing you could have done.'

'No.' The words caught in her tongue. 'There's always a choice.'

_I left him_, she thought. And then, under the skin, deep in the bone, unvoiced and terrible:

_Did you?_

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><p>++The End++<p>

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><p><strong>Author's Note:<strong> Poor Ta Min, seriously. Her life ended up in a sort of perpetual motion of suck. :( If you're interested in the origins of that first picture, the one of her and Sozin at sixteen (and don't mind a cavalcade of Funny Aneurysm moments, obviously), the two of them have it done in Chapter Five of my fic _Fortunate Son_.


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